APPENDIX 5
Digital Transformations
Party Time
J. Thomas Bullington
Party Time is a transformation from the multiplicity of 459 small squares in the color test target on the following page.
| From Real to Surreal | |||||||
Photographers have always been good at borrowing and using new technologies. Film photographers experimented with a variety of films to create interesting and unusual images; false color film, camouflage detection film, aerial film, infrared film, high-contrast lithographic film, and so on. When computers came on to the scene, photographers began using Adobe Photoshop, which was originally intended for the printing industry, not photography. It was not until Photoshop 2.5 was introduced that Dodge and Burn tools were offered. Now it is safe to say that the Photoshop family of programs is designed primarily for photographers.
Most recently, a new form of imaging has been taking place. The photographed subject is manipulated digitally and often obscured, resulting in a new hybrid image that is totally unrelated to the original subject. The composition becomes the primary subject. Several software programs can be used to create the hybrid: Photoshop, NIK, Alien Skin, Auto FX, onOne, and others. Corel and others make stand alone imaging products that photographers often use to modify and create new images from photographs.
Almost a hundred years ago, photographers under the influence of impressionist painters started a comparable movement that they called pictorialism. Its hallmarks were soft focus and mechanical manipulation of the photochemical and optical processes. Like the visual experimenters of today, they put less importance of the actual scene being depicted than the composition of the finished picture. The movement died out as people tired of the increasingly overdone manipulation, which failed to further enrich the medium.
When photographers are asked by a viewer after seeing their image, “What is it?” they might easily reply, “What would you like it to be?”
A single vertical line of pixels in the feather image was selected and then duplicated many times to form a column with horizontal bands, capturing the feeling of the windows of a skyscraper. Each column except the third was formed from a vertical line of pixels in the background along one of its edges. The third is from another part of the image to add the yellow color. Duplicating and flipping over a strip of the image on the right side increases the size of the black void at the top, which adds depth and balances the composition.
Neon City 2
J. Thomas Bullington
I am interested in using a fusion of traditional print-making, graphic design and painting with the modern digital world of the computer and digital output to produce images: thus joining ideas, materials and techniques old and new to form a single entity.
J. Thomas Bullington (www.jthomasbullington.com)
Untitled 23
Vicki H. Wilson
FROM REAL TO SURREAL
The photo at the lower right was cropped to 5 percent of its original size. The Photoshop filters Lens Correction and Ocean Ripple were applied. Color saturation and contrast were increased and the image was rotated for the final composition.
My goal is to see beyond the limits of the camera lens, to transition the real into the surreal. When composing in the camera I concentrate on the interaction of light, color and shape, paying little attention to the actual subject. Abstract photography does what abstract painting cannot do; it bypasses the blank canvas phase as the camera lens creates the genesis of the abstract composition.
Vicki H. Wilson (www.photoabstracts.com)
